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Lane-keeping app makes any car smarter

YOU don’t have to be rich to get the latest and best in advanced in-car gadgetry. A smartphone app gives any old rust bucket two key safety features normally only seen in luxury vehicles&colon; a lane-departure warning and driver-fatigue alerts.

In cars like Toyota’s high-end Lexus range, lane-departure systems use cameras and radar to warn drivers when they veer out of a traffic lane. Cameras trained on the driver’s eyes sense blinking that indicates you are drowsy, telling you to take a break.

Andrew Campbell and colleagues at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire have packed similar capabilities into an Android app called CarSafe. With a Google Galaxy Nexus phone mounted on the windscreen, the front camera points at the driver, tracking head pose, gaze direction and blink rate. A coffee cup appears on the screen, and the phone bleeps, if the driver seems drowsy. The back-facing camera is trained on the road and the app checks you are at a safe distance from the car in front and also checks for weaving outside the white lines of the traffic lane. Track tests have been encouraging and the team is now moving on to “realistic” road tests, Campbell told the UbiComp conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, earlier this month.